A 2008 Israeli documentary about Shlomo Carlebach, “You Never Know,” features followers of the late rabbi visiting his grave in Jerusalem, recounting stories of meeting him, and talking about the immense impact that he had on their lives.

Fringes are worn on Jewish garments to remind Jews to follow the commandments, to maintain the connection to God that has preserved them as a people. At the New York International Fringe Festival, now in its 17th year, three solo shows by Jewish performers also deal, in very different ways, with the theme of survival. From Mallory Schlossberg’s tale of single life in New York, “Molly Marjorie Rosenblatt Needs a Man,” to Lee J. Kaplan’s harrowing account of being tormented at school, “Bully,” to Evan Brenner’s paradoxical embrace of Buddhism, “The Hungry Ghost,” the Fringe Festival continues, like the fringes on clothing, to point in new and sometimes contradictory directions.

It is difficult to view anything inspired by the work of Janusz Korsczak, the Polish-Jewish physician/author/educator/orphanage proprietor, without interpreting it through the lens of his tragic death.

Fin-de-siècle Vienna was a city of elegant waltzes, erotic art and witty café conversations. But underneath the shimmering surface, evil overtook the city. In Otho Eskin’s one-act play, “Final Analysis” (no relation to the 1992 Richard Gere film thriller of the same title), a group of real-life Viennese-Jewish artists and thinkers of the period debate the perils that await them with the rise of Hitler. The play opened last week in Hell’s Kitchen, after winning seven awards last summer at the Midtown International Theatre Festival.

They called him the “Singing Rabbi,” the dynamic performer who transformed Jewish life with ecstatic chasidic melodies. Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach married Jewish teachings with a universal message of peace and love. Now “Soul Doctor,” a new musical based on the man and his music, is coming to Broadway. Yet swirling around the show, which opens next week at the Circle in the Square, are the allegations of sexual harassment that surfaced after his death in 1994.